Below’s a run through of how the Motorola Bluetooth DJ Headphones S805 fared to my stress-test. This review is solely based on first hand experience (so bare with my incompetence if, at all, there is any).
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[ The Sound ]
The Motorola DJ Headphones S805 claims to deliver stereo quality sound wirelessly via Bluetooth v2.0. The verdict: HELL YEAH! Once you get to pair this baby to a A2DP enabled sound-source, like your mobile phone for example, brace yourself for one heck of a groove-ride. I tried playing tracks of various genre for a more or less credible opinion. The bass portion of Blink 182‘s I Miss You intro came in strong and solid (192Bbps mp3 format). Same was true for Blue October‘s X Amount of Words and Metallica‘s Unforgiven (starting intro’s THE bomb!).

The thing that’s great with the music output quality is you could differentiate and hear out the details of each of the sound elements: synths, drums, guitars (distinctly hear the bass, rhythm, and lead on rock tracks) moreso as they swell together to a climax. I played out instrumentals to hear what they were like up close (Smashing Pumpkin‘s Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness and some string quartets) and was treated to the same gratifying experience.

There’s a barely noticeable static interference from some tracks, mostly those whose vocals are done by female artists. I tried playing the same track with a higher bitrate and the static somewhat got drowned by the better overall music quality. It’s still there but at least the listening got bearable. Play a hiphop track, though, and surprisingly find your body grooving involuntarily as you crank up the volume to the max. I’m so not kidding!

I tried comparing the audio output of the same song (Vega 4‘s Life Is Beautiful) played on my PC where I plugged in my Sony headphones and, based on quality, I’d say that were it not for the equalizer presents on Windows Media Player 11, both sounds would have been identical. I can’t wait for a winamp on Java!

[ Controls ]
With the headset alone, you may, at the turn of a dial, (1) increase or descrease volume of the sound via the left ear dial and (2) go forward or back to the next track using the dial on the right ear. At the press of a button, you may (1) turn on or off the headset, (2) make the headphones go to “pairing” mode, (3) activate the voice command function of your compatible Motorola phone, (4) answer or end an incoming call, (5) toggle on or off of the button’s pulsating blue lights, and (6) pause, start, or play the track you are currently listening to. The headstrap is also adjustable to fit various, standard human head-sizes.

There’s but one bug I discovered. When I tried stopping or pausing the music long enough using the headset controls, hitting the play button will invoke the same song rendered in two-to-three times slower its usual tempo. Freaky. I got this output on like three occasions already. I was never able to repeat the incident on a whim, though.

[ Connectivity ]
I played a track and went as far as possible from my mobile phone and it would be fair to say that continuous connectivity happens up to about 8-10 meters. However, I got cut off when I went inside the restroom, about 6 meters away from my mobile phone unit, with the door still open.

The S805 comes with a 3.5 mm stereo jack that you could use with other music players and your PC. Sound quality, though, turns to mono. Stereo jack my ass is what I say! (EDIT 03-12-2008: Thanks to Sacha Crompton, for pointing out this flaw in my review. I replicate his e-mail below for your guidance). As for the battery, it claims to run for 230 hours continuous on standby, 20 hours on talk, and 17 on audio playback. If this was true, I’d need to charge my V3X about 4 times (from fully-drained to full-bat status) until the S805 dies down. You would need to initially charge the unit for 24 hours straight to get this optimal result.

[ Form Factor ]
By look, touch, and feel, the Motorola DJ S805 may be bunched with them full-sized, supra-aural type of headphones (or “cans”) commonly used by DJs. The padding on the ear area should supposedly give the listener full experience of the audible sound output and aid in noise cancellation. I doubt if that’s the real function of the pads though but they sure are convenient to wear. Used mine while head-banging and grooving to hiphop and it never felt like it was about to fall off.

It was a good thing I pumped my phone memory up with a 1Gb storage card. All I can say is, once you go wireless, you’ll never want to get tangled up again. Ever. Believe me, I know.

EDIT March 12, 2008: Got this via email:

HI, I wanted to let you know I was decided on the S805 headphones until I read your review saying they go to mono when using the wired mode. This was a huge down side for me as I was planning on using them wired also but cannot stand mono sound. I then compared them to $150+ Sony’s which were nearly identical, hoping the wired mode on the Sony’s was stereo, well it turns out the expensive Sony’s have no wired mode at all, so I then decided mono wired is better than not wired at all.

I got the headphones today, and to my surprise the adapter cable is a stereo cable (3 metal contacts on the pins) and the sound is indeed clearly stereo (I even used winamp to put only left and only right, and it works).

I don’t know why you only got mono, perhaps you didn’t insert either end of the cable deep enough, but I would appreciate if you updated your review as it really almost put me off buying these great headphones.

Thanks for the otherwise great review, but I hope this mono issue is updated.

Thanks Sacha!

All images in this post are proprietary to the author. Copyright 2007 by Fritz Tentativa.